Key Points
Key members of the KPop Demon Hunters team break down the Saja Boys’ grand entrance and their catchy “Soda Pop” number.
Animation director Joshua Beveridge laughs at the number of meetings about “whether or not the boys should have nipples.”
The head of Sony Animation told the filmmakers of the Saja Boys, “Let’s objectify men like crazy.”
Die-hard fans of KPop Demon Hunters, the same ones collectively producing the troves of fan art that percolate the web, aren’t the only ones who obsessed over Abby Saja (voiced by SungWon Cho). But the creators behind the runaway global animated smash were fixated on the character’s pecs for more serious, artistic pursuits.
“I can’t tell you how many meetings there were about whether or not the boys should have nipples and where they should be placed on the chest,” animation director Joshua Beveridge tells Entertainment Weekly for the latest edition of It Takes a Village, the YouTube series breaking down notable scenes from film and TV. “That was a whole journey.”
Producer Michelle Wong explains a bit further. “In animation, we don’t usually show nipples,” she says. “We did it with the lightest texture as possible. One of our art directors, Wendell Dalit, his joke was like, ‘More spec! More spec!’ Which means you’re adding more light to the abs.”
“Maggie said, ‘Six months! Six months to make those abs,'” Arden Cho, the actor behind Rumi, mentions of now-Oscar-nominated co-director and KPop Demon Hunters creator Maggie Kang.
The Saja Boys of ‘KPop Demon Hunters’
Netflix
Including Kang, Chris Appelhans (co-director), Ahn Hyo-seop (Jinu), May Hong (Mira), Ji-young Yoo (Zoey), and Helen Chen (production design), the team behind the hit Netflix film sit down for an exhaustive deep dive into the making of the Saja Boys’ big entrance, which includes their brain-worm of a “Soda Pop” number.
In the movie, HUNTR/X, the worldwide K-pop girl group made up of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, spends their off-hours battling demons. But hell has a new plan: start a demon boy band to win over their legions of followers and send their souls to the demon king Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun) for devouring. Enter the Saja Boys.
“Fun fact: All the Saja Boys share a body…same model,” Kang shares. “All except Abby because we made him 20 percent bigger.”
According to Appelhans, Kristine Belson, the head of Sony Animation, which produced the Netflix-distributed film, said early on, “Let’s objectify men like crazy…. My algorithm turned into just Korean men doing body rolls for a few months.”
Saja Boys perform ‘Soda Pop’ in ‘KPop Demon Hunters’
©2025 Netflix
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As for the song “Soda Pop,” which charted on the actual global music charts, Appelhans says, “We need a genuinely great, irresistibly catchy pop song that’s also full of subversive lyrics. And that’s actually a really hard assignment.”
The filmmakers teamed with South Korean music label and agency the Black Label to create brand-new K-pop songs. “It’s just catchy like we talked about, it’s also playing into what is a typical double entendre of a pop song,” Appelhans continues.
“Because the demons are there to eat our souls, we wanted the song to be about some sort of food item,” Kang adds.
Dive deeper into the making of this KPop Demon Hunters sequence in the video above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly